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Planning the attack

After the botched bombing, Glasgow Airport went into lockdown, immigration controls were suspended and it was declared a no-fly zone.

The scene of the terror attack at Glasgow Airport in 2007

And Britain’s anti-terrorism unit were already aware of the two, following their involvement in the bungled car bombs in London the day before the Glasgow attack.

On the morning of the Glasgow attack, the Jeep had been spotted by walkers in a car park on the eastern shore of Loch Lomond.

And by lunchtime, the pair were heading to Glasgow. At 1.47pm, Ahmed sent his brother, Sabeel, a text message instructing him to visit a Google email account where he would find a full explanation of what was about to happen.

In the email Ahmed wrote to his brother, Sabeel, he referred to the atrocity he was about to carry out as “the project”.

The day after the attack Sabeel was arrested in Liverpool and jailed at the Old Bailey in 2008.

The court was told that he had received a text from Ahmed half an hour before he and Abdulla drove to the airport, which told him to read an email.

Sabeel read Ahmed’s instructions to lie to police and followed these instructions for three days.

Ahmed had planned to be dead, his project complete, by the time Sabeel read it.

In it he wrote: “This is the project I was working on. Everything else was a lie. I hope you can all forgive me for being such a good liar.

“I am sorry for putting you in this situation but it’s about time we give up our lives and families to please Allah.

“Me and some brothers were given the opportunity to hit the devil’s place, the core. So rejoice everyone and celebrate.”

Who was Kafeel Ahmed?

Ahmed was born into privilege in the Indian city of Bangalore. His parents were wealthy doctors and devout Muslims.

His dad was part of a fundamentalist sect, Jamaat-e-Islami. And the young Ahmed had spent much of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, which is home to the Wahhabi strain of Islam that spawned al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic state.

Kafeel Ahmed who died following the Glasgow Airport terror attack

As a student in India, he earned a degree in engineering. His college principal said: “He was reserved and generally kept to himself.”

Ahmed then went on to Queen’s University in Belfast where he studied for a master’s in aeronautical engineering.

He had even been working on a PhD project at the faculty of science and technology at the Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge, but this was never completed.

And it was while he was in Cambridge that he met his fellow attacker and the co-accused Mohammed Asha, who was cleared.

Ahmed then got a job in Bangalore, but this only lasted eight months, before he returned to Britain in May 2006.

At that time, he told his family that he was joining a secret project on global warming.

He then spent several months working on the two bombs that failed to explode in London the day before the Glasgow attack.

Bilal Abdulla: doctor turned terrorist

Abdulla, meanwhile, was described by his family as a polite and thoughtful son, who wouldn’t kill an ant.

In 2015, his mum said she still sees him as a loyal son who always phoned her at least twice a week to check on her.

The mum-of-six said at the time: “My son is very well-educated, very helpful, polite. Bilal isn’t capable of killing anyone.”

A doctor’s son, he was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire on August 24, 1979.

At the time of his birth, his dad was training at Stoke Mandeville Hospital on a scholarship from the Iraqi government, while his mother was working as a pharmacist.

But while Abdulla was still a baby, the family returned to Iraq where he was raised in a suburb of Baghdad.

His professor at the university of Baghdad said that Abdulla had become increasingly extreme during his studies, setting up resistance groups at a time when Iraq was under sanction and Saddam Hussein’s rule.

He graduated from the University of Baghdad in medicine in 2004, then came back to the UK to study for medical exams.

There he secured a place at Cambridge, where he met fellow student Kafeel Ahmed.

Abdulla passed medical conversion exams in 2006, then returned to Iraq.

That summer he came back to the UK and joined the Royal Alexandra Hospital as a locum junior house officer.

At Abdulla's court case, prosecutors said that in both the London and Glasgow attacks it had been luck alone that there had been no deaths.

Speaking about the London attacks, the judge said: “Your murderous intent was best shown by the obstructing of the safety mechanisms on two of the cylinders and by the 800-plus nails in one car and 1,000 in the second, designed to do nothing else but constitute a deadly form of shrapnel to maim, injure and kill."